Figure 7. Changes in maximal rain rates averaged over all events for durations of 10-min (a), 1 h (b), 6 h (c) and 24-h (d) between future and historic simulations (future – historic). Statistically significant differences are circumscribed in gray.
In contrast to the decrease in rainfall accumulation, and as exemplified by the first case study (Sect. 3.1), regionally maximal 10-min rain rates (maximum along all pixels and timesteps) in future simulations are significantly higher than in historic simulations (Fig. 4c-d, Table 1) with an average increase of 22%. This conclusion holds for all sub-regions inspected here, except for the desert sub-region, in which the increase (11%) is non-significant (Fig. 4d, Fig. S8, Table 1). Increases of the regionally maximal 10-min rain rates over both the Mediterranean climate and Sea sub-regions are on average >21%, and the increase over land, as a result of the small increase over the desert, is 18%. Furthermore, most of the events (85%) have higher values in future compared to historic simulations and this is rather consistent among the different sub-regions (Table 1). The increase in regionally maximal rain rates between historic and future simulations holds for longer durations as well (Fig. S9).
4 Summary and Discussion
This study shows the changes in rainfall patterns between paired simulations of historic and future HPEs, with the objective of identifying whether common changes in rainfall patterns exist, and characterizing these changes. The collection of objectively identified 41 HPEs was simulated twice, and the results of the two simulations are compared. The first simulation is based on historic conditions, and the second applies expected changes in various meteorological parameters from the RCP 8.5 scenario for the end of the 21stcentury on top of historic initial and boundary conditions. Selected events represent some of the heaviest precipitation events in the region around the end of the 20th century. Our results, shown first for a case study, and then for the full collection of HPEs, demonstrate the added value of using event-based simulations, and provide high resolution projections of future changes in rainfall patterns, highlighting the importance of changes in specific rainfall constituents, as discussed below.
4.1 Opportunities Gained by the Event-Based Approach and their Implications
Large-scale and long term CPM simulations are becoming increasingly attainable, allowing to better characterize precipitation extremes in future climate scenarios (e.g., Coppola et al., 2020; Kendon et al., 2018). However, there are still difficulties in providing reliable projections of rainfall during HPEs (Kendon et al., 2021); the computational and the power consumption costs of these simulations are huge (Fuhrer et al., 2018; Loft, 2020), and the rarest of extremes are difficult to characterize even in runs extending for many years. Therefore, if the purpose of a study is to identify potential changes in only a subset of the climate, e.g., HPEs, a full-climate run should be used prudently.
Here, using an event-based approach we were able to show plausible impacts of climate change on some of the heaviest rainstorms in the eastern Mediterranean. Furthermore, we show that many “plausible” instances (i.e., individual HPE events) point in the same direction; therefore, the plausible scenario may be considered as the probable scenario. Even if the entire variance of possibilities is not perfectly represented using this method, the emerging similar response enables us to garner insight on “climate questions”, such as projections of future precipitation patterns, using a weather model. We showed that rainfall accumulation under global warming conditions decreases over > 90% of the simulated HPEs and analyzed the properties of rainfall accounting for this decrease. The rain area exhibits the largest and most consistent decrease and is heavily associated with the decrease in rainfall accumulation, while increased conditional rain rate is only weakly related to rainfall accumulation and cannot counteract the decreased rain area.
The simulated change in rainfall patterns can have considerable implications both on water resources and on natural hazards, which can be illuminated if we focus on specific rainstorms. For example, event #8 (1-7 Nov 1994) is an infamous ARST storm in which more than 500 people lost their lives, and extensive floods and damages occurred in Egypt and Israel (Krichak et al., 2000; De Vries et al., 2013). This event shows a substantial reduction in total rainfall under future-simulated conditions (-51%; Fig. 5, Fig. S10). Such a reduction would probably lead to a reduced risk of flash flooding, especially at the northern part of the region. However, while in many places total rainfall decreased in the simulation, few high-intensity rain cells still impacted the Sinai desert (Movie S2), with total rainfall of >100 mm, which would undoubtedly cause substantive floods in this region.
HPE #12 (Fig. S11) triggered a major streamflow increase and raised the level of the Sea of Galilee, the largest surficial freshwater reservoir in the region, by 45 cm within a week (compared with <10 cm rise the week before the storm occurred). This rise is equivalent to the yearly industrial consumption of freshwater in Israel at that time (~90 106 m3) and constitutes more than a fifth of the annual water rise of the lake. The simulation of the future event indicates a substantial decrease in total rainfall (-27%). As the hydrological response to decreases in rainfall is non-linear (e.g., Peleg et al., 2014), this would probably lead to an even larger decrease in freshwater recharge with major implications on water resources. While a hydrological simulation of the different events is out of the scope of this paper, we stress that to have better insights about the hydrological response, a comparison of historic and future simulations of specific events through a hydrological model is highly desired.
It is important to note that the frequency of events (e.g., Myhre et al., 2019) is not implicitly considered in our simulations. Rain events in the region are projected to have a reduced frequency (~-20%; Hochman et al., 2018; Zappa et al., 2015), and thus, the decreased rainfall we show here for the specific simulated events, may be considered as an underestimation of the projected changes in total precipitation from HPEs accounting for event occurrences.
Nevertheless, a minor shortcoming of the PGW methodology is that frequency data is not totally excluded from the applied changes, which arise from the climatology of 25 years of CMIP5 models’ simulations. For this reason, changes in specific properties of events should be reflected by the mean climatology. Meaning that if our simulations would constitute a large portion of a 25-yr time interval, they would affect the mean climatology as well. Forty-one HPEs, however, are not a substantial part of the climatological mean of 25 years (~3% of the days in the season we examine [Oct-Apr]), and thus our simulations are not expected to be severely biased by this issue.
A potential limitation that this study can be criticized for is the use of a single climate scenario forcing for the PGW and as such it will give only plausible results, rather probable. However, (a) this single scenario is the ensemble mean of CMIP5 models, which can be considered as a best estimate, to date, of large scale future changes, though work currently in progress shows that CMIP6 models generally simulate similar, and if anything more severe, changes to CMIP5 in this region (not shown), (b) we use a collection of many objectively-identified events that constitutes some of the highest magnitude HPEs in the region. Results for this large set of paired-simulations show a similar behavior of different events representing different synoptic-scale conditions. Therefore, we claim that the sign and magnitude of the changes that emerge from these simulations should be considered as a probable projection of HPEs in the region.
Indeed, the PGW event-based methodology provides us with projections for HPEs in a warmer climate. However, it must be noted we do not attempt to provide a climatology of HPEs in the future, nor give updated extreme event levels and frequencies. While these can be obtained using a framework which accounts for the frequency of events (Marra et al., 2019), the results we obtain have significance in drawing possible future scenarios for some of the heaviest precipitation events in the region. High resolution rainfall projections can also help improving future predictions in approaches requiring a changed rainfall distribution (e.g., Marra et al., 2021).
4.2 Changes in Rainfall Patterns During Rainstorms
Future rainstorms simulated in this work show quite a difference in rainfall patterns compared to historic rainstorms, mainly being more concentrated in both space and time. Given that the conditional rain rate increases, one might expect an increase in total precipitation during heavy precipitation events, as projected, for example, over Europe (e.g., Y. Chen et al., 2020; Hawcroft et al., 2018; Kendon et al., 2014). However, two other factors, less often addressed, negatively affect total rainfall: the size of the rain area, and the duration of the events. Among these two, we find that the rain area is the main contributor to decreased rainfall accumulation, which decreases, on average, by 40%. Furthermore, the rain area has a high correlation with the changes in rainfall accumulation, while the event duration decreases on average by 9% and has a low correlation with rainfall accumulation changes.
It must be noted, however, that the changes in the rain area are not constant over different rain rates thresholds. The baseline 0.1 mm h-1 intensity is a good proxy for the total storm area. Going to larger thresholds, the area represented is a better indicator for the intense “core” of the storm, namely the inner part of convective cells during the storm. In fact, we found an increase in the rain area for thresholds of >10 mm hr-1. This means that, although the total rain area of HPEs shrinks, their cores are getting larger in future simulations. Similar findings were reported by Peleg et al. (2018) using historic radar observations over the eastern Mediterranean and by Wasko et al. (2016) using rain gauges in Australia. Both studies showed that total rain area and the convective core area scale with temperature in opposite directions: total area exhibits a negative scaling, while the area of the convective cores is positively scaled with temperature; this is probably related to an enhanced moisture convergence into the convective cores from the total storm extent. In contrast, results from studies of future extreme precipitation in the Netherlands and in the UK show the area of the storms is expected to increase with global warming (Y. Chen et al., 2020; Lochbihler et al., 2017, 2019), which may indicate a regional dependence in the scaling of the rain area, but this topic should be addressed in future studies (Fowler, Lenderink, et al., 2021).
Since the hydrological response to HPEs is heavily related to space-time precipitation characteristics, the results shown above would have an immense impact on the hydrology of future rainstorms. Larger storm cores, having increased short duration rain rates may increase the risk of urban flooding and short-lived, fast responding flash floods (e.g., Tarasova et al., 2019), as well as soil erosion (e.g., Shmilovitz et al., 2021). However, this effect is expected to be mitigated by the decreased rainfall frequency caused by the shorter storm duration and smaller overall area. Combined, a possible conclusion could be that over the affected (rainy) area, the risk of short-duration natural hazards is higher, while over the entire domain this is uncertain. Yet, a clearer conclusion can be drawn for the detrimental effects of the changes in rainfall patterns over the entire storm through longer-duration processes: mean rain rates and amounts are expected to dramatically decrease. Therefore, the expected hydrological impact would include a further reduction of streamflow and a decline in freshwater resources, which requires immediate address by policy makers.
Two key aspects are missing from the results presented here: a detailed analysis of the meteorological factors affecting the modeled change in rainfall patterns and their scaling with temperature, and a modeling of the hydrological impact of these changes. These two prospective aspects are currently being further studied. We call for a continued use of the PGW methodology as a relatively easy-to-implement experiment, with results relevant to events of specific interest such as HPEs.
5 Conclusions
Through high-resolution event-based simulations of eastern Mediterranean HPEs in present and future climate, we show that in future: (a) event rainfall accumulations decrease substantially (inter-event average = -30%), throughout the study region, (b) mean conditional rain rate is increased (+15%), (c) event duration is getting shorter (-9%), and (d) rain area becomes dramatically smaller (-40%). The areal coverage for various rain rates shows opposing changes for lower and higher rain rates: it is reduced for low rain rate thresholds, and expanded for high rate thresholds. Thus, rainstorms become more concentrated in future simulations, with convective cores that exhibit shorter autocorrelation distance and higher regionally maximal rain rates (+22%). Furthermore, some increases in local short duration rain rates are seen mostly over the coastal region, but long duration rain rates are decreased throughout the region. The changes found are rather consistent across events, suggesting that these event-based conclusions may actually be probable. Changes in rainfall properties identified here reveal the dominance of the rain area in determining the decrease in total rainfall, with great implications over future hydrological processes.
Acknowledgments, Samples, and Data
The authors thank Y. Shmilovitz and R. Dann for both fruitful discussions and help with coding issues. This research has been supported by the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology (grant no. 61792) and the Israel Water Authority. Shacham radar data for the 41 HPEs are available online (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5353714). ERA-Interim data were downloaded from the Research Data Archive at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (https://doi.org/10.5065/D6CR5RD9). CMIP5 data were downloaded from the ESGF Node at DKRZ (https://esgf-data.dkrz.de/projects/esgf-dkrz/tou). The WRF namelist.input file can be found in the Supporting Information. FM was supported by the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (ISAC) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR).
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